Henry Samuel

Investigators seeking the missing Malaysia Airlines plane face a "colossal task" that is "far, far harder" than the two-year search for an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic, the man who led the French inquiry has warned.

Alain Bouillard's comments came as experts described the deep waters of the Southern Ocean that may contain debris belonging to flight MH370 as "one of the most hostile environments in the world".

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Mr Bouillard was in charge of the hunt for AF447 that crashed into the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, between Rio de Janeiro and Paris with 228 people on board.

It took only six days for French and Brazilian naval forces to find the first bodies and the Airbus A330 tailpiece. But that was only the beginning of a long search to recover the main wreck and, above all, the flight recorders.

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Mr Bouillard, 63, worked for France's air accident investigation bureau, BEA, a world authority on air crashes and also led the investigation into the Concorde disaster outside Paris in 2000. Three BEA members are helping the Malaysian authorities in their search.

"This disappearance is still a great mystery, and will lead to an inquiry and a search that is far, far harder than that we had looking for Air France 447," Mr Bouillard said.

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"Firstly we had many more clues. We knew that the Air France plane had a problem, thanks to 24 ACAR messages sent over four minutes; we knew its precise location four minutes before impact, which allowed us to reduce our search zone to only 40 nautical miles," he said. "That is nothing compared to the surface area of today's search."

Brazilian Navy sailors pick a piece of debris from Air France flight AF447 out of the Atlantic Ocean, some 1,200 km northeast of Recife, Brazil. Photo: Reuters

"We were initially put off by satellite images of a fuel slick that turned out to be a false lead," he said. "Planes found debris that had nothing to do with the crash, including wreckage of another plane on a beach."

If these indeed prove to be from Flight MH370, he said experts would have to start studying the currents in this zone immediately to work out the "reverse drift" - a theoretical estimate of the initial position of bodies and debris by studying currents and winds in the crash area.

Adding to the challenge, the images of the debris were taken eight days after the plane was spotted, meaning the debris itself would have floated much further east since the images were captured.

"After you have identified and examined some debris, you can piece together how the plane broke up. Was it in the air, was it during a sea landing, or did it hit the ocean surface? From that you can build up a scenario," he said.

If the latest wreckage sightings turn out to be correct, the search will have to overcome a series of almost unimaginable challenges, not least waters so deep that only a handful of vessels would be capable of scouring the seabed for the plane's black box.

Mr Bouillard said reaching the wreck was not the hardest task facing search teams. "We found the AF447 at around 12,000 feet [3657 m]. The Phoenix Towed Pinger Locator [which can detect emergency black box beacons] can go down to around 6,000 metres. The first question is: where was the point of impact? We can only send out serious means once we have defined a much smaller search area."

The search for Air France's main wreck and black boxes long proved fruitless, despite gathering all the world's vessels capable of finding them. These included underwater drones with sonars that can sweep large surface areas of the seabed to find objects; a deep-towed sonar; two remotely operated vehicles and three autonomous underwater vehicles.

In the end they did away with complex equations predicting the wreck's likely location and simply scoured the zone systematically. After detecting a large object on the sea floor, they sent down remote vehicles equipped with high definition cameras. Mr Bouillard was in the ship watching in real time when the black boxes were found. "It was a euphoric moment," he said.

As for the present investigation, Mr Bouillard said: "There are three main questions you must ask in an inquiry: what happened, how did it happen and why did it happen? We still have still made no progress on what happened.

"It will be highly complex, colossal task and a result is anything but guaranteed."